One of the first posts we ever wrote on Wings Over Scotland, back in November 2011, recorded the fact that total daily sales of newspapers in Scotland had dipped below a million for the first time ever (to a total of 986,657).
The six-and-a-half years that have followed have been probably the most tumultuous in Scottish history – an independence referendum, a Brexit referendum and the death of Rangers, to name but three of the significant events that have taken place in just two-thirds of a decade.
At the very least, then, you’d imagine it might have given the declining newspaper industry one last dead cat bounce.
The like-for-like sales of the same newspapers today is 492,353.
From that article, these are the figures for sales between July 2011 and July 2012:
And these are the most recent stats for the same papers (mainly July 2018):
DAILIES
The Scottish Sun 154,552
Daily Record 120,142
Scottish Daily Mail 73,306
Daily Star 31,532
Scottish Daily Express 35,079
The Scotsman 14,978
Daily Mirror 8,397
Daily Telegraph 13,170
The Times 18,358
The i 13,606
The Guardian 7,507
Financial Times 1,726
Total: 492,353
That’s a drop of almost exactly half (50.1%, to be precise) for the weekday papers.
SUNDAYS
Sunday Mail 124,255
The Sun On Sunday 113,471
Sunday Post 88,360
Scottish Mail On Sunday 62,080
Sunday Times 37,567
Scotland On Sunday 12,996
Daily Star Sunday 17,712
Scottish Sunday Express 20,862
Sunday Mirror 6,561
Sunday Telegraph 11,122
The Observer 11,501
Total: 506,487
And the Sundays have done only fractionally better, dropping 49.8% from 1,008,239.
Now, plunging newspaper sales are widely held to be a worldwide phenomenon. But that isn’t actually true.
And if the media of any country on Earth should have been in a strong position to even temporarily fight the trend with informed, fair, insightful coverage of exciting national events, it should have been Scotland.
Except that Scotland doesn’t really HAVE a media. Most of its press is owned outside Scotland, and a lot of it outside the UK. Much of the content in all of its best-selling papers is imported from English editions, with a few homegrown pages slotted in.
And of course, the overwhelming majority of “Scottish” newsprint (and therefore the papers-driven broadcast media) espouses the political views of only one half of the Scottish population. There are left-wing papers and right-wing papers, Labour papers and Tory papers, even Lib Dem papers, but when it comes to the defining issue of Scottish life since 2011 only the Unionist side has had a voice on the newsstands.
(The National has only existed for half of that time and accounts for barely more than 1% of all daily Scottish newspaper sales.)
We’re sure that in those circumstances it’s a coincidence that sales in Scotland have plummeted faster than almost anywhere else, despite the unique catalogue of events that should have been selling papers by the vanload to a highly-engaged population (85% turned out in the referendum) that was hungry for solid information and analysis.
You’d actually have to extend the bottom of that graph to make room for the size of Scotland’s monster drop in newspaper circulation. Losing half your sales in six and a half years is a huge underperformance even on Europe-wide trends – around twice as bad, in fact – and life in Belgium and France and the Netherlands and Ireland and Germany and Denmark has by and large been rather less exciting in that time than it has in Scotland.
The SNP’s shock landslide victory in 2011 and the independence referendum that it triggered should have been an open goal and a gift for any remotely competent media.
But Scotland’s is almost uniquely inadequate, inept and unfit for purpose, and instead it reacted with such monumental, sour and sustained petulance to those unexpected occurences that the people of a country which once read more newspapers per head of population than anyone on the planet have turned their backs on it.
Rarely can the demise of any entity have been more richly merited.
